in the wrong done to any of its members take action as a community; it
proceeds, not against the individual who has inflicted the wrong, but
against the community to which he belongs. "The wrong done," is, as
Mr. Hobhouse says (I, 91), "the act of the family or clan and may be
avenged on any member of that family or clan." There is collective
responsibility for the wrong done, just as there is collective
responsibility for righting it.

If, now, we enquire, What are the earliest offences against which
public action is taken? and why? we may remember that Mr. Hobhouse has
stated them to be witchcraft and breaches of the marriage law; and that
the punishment of those offences corresponds, as he has said, "roughly
to our own administration of justice" (I, 81). Now, in the case of
breaches of the marriage laws--mating with a cousin on the mother's
side instead of with a cousin on the father's side, marrying into a
forbidden class--it is obvious that there is no individual who has
suffered injury and that there is no individual to experience
resentment. It is the community that suffers or is expected to suffer;
and it expects to suffer, because it, in the person of one of its {228}
members, has offended. Collectively it is responsible for the misdeeds
of its members. Whom, then, has it offended? To whom is it
responsible? Who will visit it with punishment, unless it makes haste
to set itself right? The answer given by a certain tribe of the Sea
Dyaks makes the matter clear: they, Mr. St. John tells us in his _Life
in the Forests of the Far East_ (I, 63, quoted by Westermarck, I, 49),
"are of opinion that an unmarried girl proving with child must be
offensive to the superior powers, who, instead of always chastising the
individual, punish the tribe by misfortunes happening to its members.
They therefore on the discovery of the pregnancy fine the lovers, and
sacrifice a pig to propitiate offended heaven, and to avert that
sickness or those misfortunes that might otherwise follow." That is,
of course, only one instance. But we may safely say that the marriage
law is generally ascribed to the ordinance of the gods, even in the
lowest tribes, and that breaches of it are offences against heaven. It
is unnecessary to prove, it need only be mentioned, that witchcraft is
conspicuously offensive to the religious sentiment, and is punished as
an offence against the god or gods. When, then, we consider the origin
and natu